12/23/2008 @ 7:00PM

Debating The Smart Phone

Many of us have an idea of how we’d build the perfect smart phone. Maybe it’s one part iPhone, two parts BlackBerry. Or a mix of Samsung’s sleekness and HTC’s crisp graphics.

Plenty of fans think some phones are perfect as is. Others concede that no handset will ever please most consumers, no matter how hard manufacturers or carriers try.

Here’s what some experts had to say on the subject of the perfect smart phone.

“The perfect smart phone should have four deep capabilities: a big screen (3.5 inches at a minimum); a Qwerty keyboard; great battery life (five to six hours of active surfing on 3G and 120 minutes of talk time on top of that); and, most importantly, powerful software. Today there are four alternatives: Symbian S60, used primarily by Nokia, Apple’s OS X, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.

My favorite smart phones at the moment are Apple’s iPhone, Nokia’s E71 and the BlackBerry Bold. The perfect smart phone is a moving target–it never exists, as every small improvement moves the bar higher.” –Christian Lindholm, mobile visionary and director at European design agency Fjord

“Not surprisingly, my perfect smart phone is pretty much Apple’s iPhone 3G. With the iPhone, Apple has created the first true consumer smart phone. It’s so simple, my 3-year-old godson can swipe to unlock, flick between screens, choose his applications and interact easily all by himself. (About all he can do with other smart phones is get frustrated enough to want to throw them). Behind all that usability, however, Apple has also packed in a real operating system powerful enough to let developers create the next generation of mobile applications, including cutting-edge GPS-aware cloud services like Google Maps. They’ve come the closest so far to a truly convergent device.”–Rene Ritchie, editor, TheiPhoneBlog.com

“The BlackBerry Bold leaves little room for improvement. The Bold’s faux leather back and metallic accents scream luxury and with 3G and a 624 mHz processor, the BlackBerry user experience is kicked up to a new level of performance. In terms of having a capable smart phone that gets things done while on the go from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., this is it.

And when the workday is over and you’re looking for things to do, the Bold doesn’t disappoint as a media device either. The Bold’s display is absolutely brilliant, providing picture/movie viewing quality that sets a new standard for smart phones, and the Bold’s dual internal speakers are surprisingly loud and clear. This makes the BlackBerry Bold a true 24/7 smart phone. My only complaint is that the Bold is a little too large to be considered truly pocketable.” — Kevin Michaluk, editor, CrackBerry.com

“For me, the perfect smart phone can adapt to whatever usage pattern I need, and no other smart phone form factor does that as well as the T-Mobile G1.

Simply speaking, you have an iPhone-esque capacitive touchscreen, Blackberry-esque trackball, Treo-esque hardware buttons, and, of course, a full keyboard. If you’re a smart-phone user on a different platform, jumping over to the G1 is easy–everyone has a feature to feel at home with. The big vibrant touchscreen is useful for Web browsing and media functions, and if you need to type out a long e-mail, slide open the keyboard. It’s the best of both worlds.

More importantly, the T-Mobile G1 runs Android, which is flat-out the most exciting and open smart phone operating system around. It may not have all of the features of competing platforms, but it’s developing rapidly.” –Casey Chan, editor, AndroidCentral.com

“To me, the perfect phone is something that gets used all day, every day–be it for games, data, productivity, texting or plain old voice. I am obviously biased toward Android, but it’s largely due to the amount of Google services I use on a daily basis. Android offers a great blend of Google apps, which is only going to grow. I’m looking for a good RSS reader and WordPress app, but expect those both soon. I’d really like a soft keyboard for my G1 so I can knock out one-handed texts and e-mails. I’m a big fan of Samsung’s recent products and look forward to their Android handsets.” –Scott Webster, founder and editor of AndroidGuys.com.

“The Palm Centro is the perfect smart phone for me. The Centro is cute, and it’s small and very pocketable. With the front-facing full Qwerty keyboard, users can easily type out e-mails and text messages. The keys have a rubbery feel to them that keeps your fingertips from slipping off. Most importantly, the Palm operating system has a user-friendly interface that is easy to learn, allows me to navigate quickly, and runs plenty of interesting applications. There’s a stylus if you need one, but with the Centro, Palm has given us a nice, one-handed experience, and you can easily navigate with the five-way center button.” –Jennifer Chappell, editor, TreoCentral.com

“While I don’t believe that there is a ‘perfect smart phone,’ I do believe that there is a perfect smart phone for me. Everybody has different needs when it comes to mobility and mine include e-mail, browsing and power.

For me, the smart phone that best meets my needs is still the somewhat-dated Motorola Q9h. It has a big, front-facing keyboard that’s easy to type on, sports a very good default browser and has the chops to run any application I throw at it. It runs Windows Mobile Standard, which is a non-touchscreen version that hasn’t received much attention of late, but is fast, powerful and easy on batteries. I do wish that a version with wi-fi and a larger screen would come along, but even without those features it’s still the smart phone I always come back to.”–Dieter Bohn, editor, WMExperts.com

“What’s most important to you? Is it pure potential in what developers might do? Then Android might be best. Do you want something a corporation can support? Then go with a RIM or Windows Mobile phone. The Nokia N-Series has one of the best cameras. The iPhone is arguably the best phone for entertainment. Platforms have different attributes. What you don’t want to do as a vendor is create a Franken-gadget, cramming in features just because you can.” –Avi Greengart, research director of mobile devices for Current Analysis

“Trying to create the perfect smart phone is like tilting at windmills. We keep moving the goal posts. There’s a pretty varied set of things that people like and don’t like. It depends on what you use your phone for, what you depend on it for. One reason people even talk about this is because phones are the most intimate piece of technology we own and use. You don’t hear people talking about the perfect computer.” –Mark Donovan, senior vice president of mobile products at comScore M:Metrics